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Monday, October 31, 2011

Tablet computing is on the move to overtake mobile computing.First introduced by Microsoft in 1999, many viewed the Tablet PC as a toy, a device that couldn't get any real work done. With the release of Apple's iPad in 2010, the mobile computing world has been consumed with tablets. A mobile device that is bigger than a smartphone, but smaller than a laptop, Tablet PCs are quickly becoming the device of choice for professionals who need the power of a computer, with the portability of a smartphone.You may also like to read "10 reasons why tablets will overtake laptops"

The laptop has been around for quite some time, but it will more than likely be replaced as the go-to tool for computing on the move. What will be the successor? The tablet obviously. Many doubters think the tablet is nothing more than a gimmick to help boost sales. I was one of those doubters for quite some time. But after using tablets enough, I have come around to seeing just how incredibly helpful that technology is. Here are some reasons why I believe tablets will replace the laptop as the mobile device of choice. You may also like to see Infographic on "Will the Tablet Replace the Laptop?"

1: Power consumptionThere is no question here: The tablet blows away the laptop with regard to power consumption. On average, I can get a full day out of a tablet on a single charge. A laptop? Not even close. And for anyone on the go, losing power is just another obstacle that interferes with work. With a tablet, you don't have that issue. It would be a rare occasion that you would burn through your power before getting access to a means of recharging.

2: VirusesAndroid? iPad? Viruses anyone? I think not. Not that it will never happen, but it's a pretty safe bet that tablets will never suffer from the same deluge of viruses that plagues a Windows laptop. Because of this, a tablet can safely work on without concern for viruses and malware. Oh sure, you'll find antivirus software in the Android Market, but they are pretty much pointless. Who in the world wouldn't want to work with a portable device that isn't vulnerable to the masses of viruses and malware out in the wild?

3: PortabilityYou can lug around a 4- to 12-pound laptop or a sub .5-pound tablet. Which do you want when you're going through airports, taxis, hotels, conferences, meetings, etc.? You're going to choose the tablet every time. But not just because of weight. The ability to work with a tablet in confined spaces totally overshadows the laptop. Need to work in a cab? Tablet. Need to work in the bathroom? Tablet. You simply can't beat the tablet for portability.

4: Cost effectivenessOut of the starting gate, a really good tablet will cost about the same as a low- to mid-range laptop. So you're getting more for your money at the outset. But now figure in the price of an extra battery and software for the laptop and you can see how quickly the cost will add up. Tablets are fast becoming one of the most cost-effective office tools you will find.

5: Online connectionPay the extra fee and get your tablet with a 4G connection, and you won't have to worry about finding a Wi-Fi connection to access whatever cloud or service you need. Most models can be purchased with a constant network connection (to the tune of 3G or 4G), which makes the tablet a step ahead of most laptops. Yes, you can purchase aircards for laptops, but that's just another piece of hardware to worry about.

6: Available applicationsThere are thousands upon thousands of applications now available for tablets. So many in number and variety are these applications, it almost makes going back to a laptop a real pain. And yes, a good portion of those apps are worthless, but not all of them. And a good portion of the solid, useful apps are free! Best of all, those apps can be installed from anywhere without installation media. You have a network connection, you can install software.

7: User friendlinessTablet interfaces are probably some of the single most user-friendly desktops you will come across. They are simple, elegant, and don't get in the way of work. I fully believe (as do Ubuntu and GNOME) that this is the future of the PC desktop. The applications (for the most part) were also designed with amazing user friendliness in mind. Simple to use, very little clutter to the interface (no Ribbons to get in the way), and singular in purpose (in many cases). So you might have more apps installed than you would on a laptop, but because of the ease of installation/removal, that's not a problem.

8: Bluetooth connectivityI have become a fond user of the Bluetooth. Headphones, headsets, keyboards, you name it. And tablets make the connection between these devices a breeze. Connecting those same devices to a laptop? Not so easy. Even with a built-in card, the connection process is not nearly as easy as it is when done from a tablet.

9: EfficiencyGetting a laptop and a tablet out of hibernation is like comparing apples and oranges. Tablets are as close to an instant-on tool as we have in the industry. And when on the go, nothing beats instant on. Need to write a note or send off a fast email? You'll be completing that task much more quickly when doing it from a tablet.

10: Social integrationSome might argue that social networking isn't ideal for business use. I would argue that it is. Even when you're on the go, you need to remain in contact with co-workers, family, and friends. Why not do that with the ease of nearly seamless integration? Forget having to use a browser for everything. Instead, grab an Android tablet that can quickly have you Facebooking, Tweeting, and Tumbling. And if you think that's nothing more than a waste of time, remember that small businesses depend upon social networking tools for free marketing.

The tablet era:Tablets are not only here to stay, it will only be a matter of time before they have fully and finally usurped the laptop as the go-to hardware for the mobile business user. After you get past the acclimation period for the keyboard, the tablet is an amazing tool for portable business (or even casual) usage.

The Google TV software update released on Friday focuses on four areas: simplicity, improved search, a custom YouTube experience and Android apps.

The interface is simpler, the customizable home screen has been redesigned to offer swift access to an owner's favorite content, and all shortcuts are shown within the "all apps" feature, similar to how it's done on an Android smartphone or tablet, Google said.

The search feature has been improved across the board. Further, a new app called "TV & Movies" lets consumers browse through 80,000 movies and TV episodes across cable, satellite, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and other sites.

Google has also integrated YouTube more closely with Google TV search so consumers can turn any topic into a channel.

The YouTube experience for Google TV has been revamped so consumers can get to videos more rapidly.

Finally, Google TV now has access to the Android Market. So far, 50 developers have put up Google TV apps on the Android Market.

The update will be available on Sony devices early next week and on Logitech devices after that. More updates and more Google TV partners are in the works.It's The Apps That Count

Google reached out to devs to create apps for Google TV at the device's launch back in May of 2010, so why have only 50 devs responded, given the phenomenal growth rate of Android mobile apps?

"We worked closely with these developers to get their apps ready for the update," Google's Herbert said. The update itself will include Android and Web apps from more than 100 partners when it's released, he added.

More than 50 of these partners have developed new apps for the update, and there will be about 800 Android apps available on the Android Market, of which 30 will work well on television.

"With thousands of developers, we expect new apps to appear on Google TV all the time," Herbert stated. Apps will be offered by partners including CNN Money, Flixter, Fox Business, Kraft Cooking, NPR, Motor Trend and The Wall Street Journal, he elaborated.

"Supporting a new platform such as a TV is not simply about porting the code over," Simon Khalaf, president and CEO of Flurry Analytics, told TechNewsWorld. "It's about developing a great experience."

It will take time to develop Google TV apps, "but the excitement [among devs] is there, and in big numbers," Khalaf added.

Another factor could be that few Android app devs are really making any money, Enderle told TechNewsWorld.Who Wants Set-Top Boxes Anyhow?

Longtime Google TV partner Logitech had to cut the price of its Google TV offerings twice this year, from US$299 to $249 and then again to $99, in an attempt to boost sales.

To put things in perspective, Apple quietly discontinued its 40 GB Apple TV set-top box and slashed $100 off the 160 GB model to bring the price to $229 back in September of 2009.

One year later, Cupertino announced a new version of the Apple TV for $99.

It could be that consumers may not want to shell out money for a set-top box from a third party when cable companies offer them as part of a subscription package, Enderle stated in a previous interview.

"HP was in this market and it got out," Enderle elaborated. "NetGear and LinkSys had products that never sold well. The only product that has really moved well is the Xbox, but that's probably because the vast majority of people bought it to play video games."

This infographic describes statistical differences between Mac Users and PC users. It provides differences in several categories including lifestyle, political views, and food of choice. Find out the interesting facts.

Since the launch of Siri and the iPhone 4S, developers have been keen on getting the new personal assistant to work on other Apple devices, mainly the iPhone 4 and the iPad (mainly because you can get either of those for over half off what you pay for the 4S and iPad 2). The problem seen before with previous attempts is that Siri would install, but it wouldn't talk to Apple's Siri servers to give you any proper answers or responses.

The video below shows that the dark ages of Siri's silence on older Apple devices is over. Developer Steven Troughton-Smith was successful in getting Siri to work on a jailbroken iPhone 4S, and therefore used some of the files from the iPhone 4S to use on the iPhone 4 and iPad to make it all work.

Steven Troughton-Smith won't be giving the process away though, but does state that he'll post detailed 20 step process on how to do the hack after the iPhone 4S jailbreak is made available publically.

Microsoft's Kinect Xbox 360 accessory is celebrating its first birthday this week.

Microsoft originally introduced Kinect on November 4 last year. Kinect was initially available for the Xbox 360 but thanks to a range of Kinect hacks, Microsoft announced an official way to develop with Kinect for PC. The company had plans for this all along but was forced to bring them forward after a large number of hobbyists and researchers began to use the device in various scenarios. Almost immediately following the launch of Kinect, hobbyists and academics from around the world embraced Kinect possibilities in ways that surprised and delighted, explained Microsoft's corporate communications chief, Frank Shaw, in a blog post on Monday. As we watched these stories unfold, the term "The Kinect Effect" emerged in hallway conversations at Microsoft as a way to describe the amazing and creative ways Kinect was being used.

Microsoft is using the "Kinect Effect" terminology as a way to demonstrate the profound effect of the device and how it will change computing in the future. The software giant has witnessed hundreds of unique stories and YouTube videos of how Kinect was helping daily activities and improving the way people work. We saw Kinect being used by therapists and physicians as part of a rehabilitation program for stroke victims, as a skill-building technique for children with autism, and as an application for hospitals in Spain enabling surgeons to scroll through medical images in the operating room with gestures so they could avoid the need to rescrub, said Shaw.

Kinect hackers have shown off Minority Report style multitouch control and the Kinect running on Mac OS X. Videos also emerged of device owners fully controlling Windows 7 and interactive prototype puppets. Some hackers even managed to get Angry Birds working with Kinect. Microsoft is now promising that the future will include Kinect in a big way. The company will open up its software development kit (SDK) to commercial businesses next year. "We recognize the intense commercial interest in harnessing the capabilities of Kinect, and are working with a wide range of companies and developers to create a great set of tools and APIs," explained Shaw. Microsoft is working with over 200 companies to help them create unique applications across 25 industries.

June 24 in Singapore, opened a new wonder of the world. "Sky Park" Marina Bay Sands is located on the 200-meter height on the three skyscrapers, as if on three pillars. Here is the most expensive in the world of casinos, bars, restaurants, the largest outdoor swimming pool, 150 meters long and even the Museum of Modern Art.

You can find the bendable concept mobile phones everywhere on the Internet.Nokia's research team is seriously working on the flexible displays and UIs. Nokia Kinect is a prototype bendable phone and its user interface works on the bends making by the user. For example just bend the screen to select, zoom, move between UI elements, and change the volume of music. If it sounding crazy and great then, watch the video given below of the Nokia Kintect bendable prototype phone below in action

The ever-expanding Android smartphone family got a few huge new additions recently, with Motorola announcing the impressive DROID RAZR and Samsung outing the newest in the Nexus line, the Galaxy Nexus, the first phone to ship with the buzzed-about Android Ice Cream Sandwich. Both of these new Android hadnsets will battle for consumer money against the current smartphone sales champion, the iPhone 4S. But which mobile device gives you the best bang for your buck: The iPhone 4S, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus or the Motorola Droid RAZR?

A few things to note here: The Droid RAZR will be getting Ice Cream Sandwich sometime in early 2012, according to reports. The special features list is by no means exhaustive and is based on what the manufacturers are promoting as key selling points for their respective phones

We all use the internet. Is that too obvious? Well guess what, you are ruining the world you live on every time you make a google search. Does the power of the internet as a communication tool out-weigh the amount of CO2 released by us constantly using the internet?

I would think so. They say knowledge is power and the internet is pure information. Facebook has easily helped thousands of people get together and help the environment. Google maps also helps with public transportation. There is now the option to show me what bus to take, the time to be at the bus stop and also where and when to get off. Wikipedia's reliability may be joked about, but it has proved to be just as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I believe that without the internet our society would not have taken the steps it has on global warming. We have 100% electric cars, almost every fortune 500 company has donated some money or has marketed their product to appeal to the environmentally friendly. I think we’re on the right track, we just can’t stop now.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Not a day goes by when we don't find another hidden gem Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich has to offer. While the first Android 4.0 device (Samsung Galaxy Nexus) is yet to be officially released, developers who have access to the APK and some individuals who have access to the actual Galaxy Nexus phone are offering small treats to Android fans by posting tidbits online.

However one major feature that we've seen left out of most Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich stories (or not given enough attention) is hardware acceleration.

When many users compare Android against the iPhone and its iOS platform, two things come up frequently: battery life and the iPhone beig more "smoother" than Android. Well the latter is thanks to hardware acceleration employed by iOS for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. And now that ability is finally available with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Furthermore, not only will hardware acceleration correct this issue but will also optimize battery life. So what we're looking at here is as big as Android 4.0's other more publicized features like resizable widgets, face recognition for the lockscreen and the new Gmail and People UI.

A carbon footprint has historically been defined as "the total set of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by an organization, event, product or person.". A measure of the total amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions of a defined population, system or activity, considering all relevant sources, sinks and storage within the spatial and temporal boundary of the population, system or activity of interest. Calculated as carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2) using the relevant 100-year global warming potential (GWP100)."

Greenhouse gases can be emitted through transport, land clearance, and the production and consumption of food, fuels, manufactured goods, materials, wood, roads, buildings, and services. For simplicity of reporting, it is often expressed in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide, or its equivalent of other GHGs, emitted. Once the size of a carbon footprint is known, a strategy can be devised to reduce it, e.g. by technological developments, better process and product management, changed Green Public or Private Procurement (GPP), carbon capture, consumption strategies, and others. Read more to see the Infographic of global carbon footprint of Nations. See Where your country stands.

The main influences on carbon footprints include population, economic output, and energy and carbon intensity of the economy. These factors are the main targets of individuals and businesses in order to decrease carbon footprints. Scholars suggest the most effective way to decrease a carbon footprint is to either decrease the amount of energy needed for production or to decrease the dependence on carbon emitting fuels.

We have found out-Stanford Kay's excellent infographic of global carbon emissions.Some 200+ different countries are represented by bubbles, color-coded by continent, where the size of each is proportional to its carbon emissions.

If you like Twitter and want to Generate your own Infographic of Twitter than Visual.ly can help you. InfoGraphic can be of solo type...or you can compete with some one of your choice. Infographic contains your follower ratio, tweets per day, your fav topics, your strongest connection and lots more. Find out your twitter facts and share with us!!! Twitterize Yourself

Saturday, October 29, 2011

From 0 to 200 Million Tweets in 5 Years. In honor of Twitter’s fifth anniversary, we've made the following infographic plotting out key milestones on it’s path to 200 million tweets a day. Following Twitter, get it?

Facebook's infographic is too long and thin to properly embed on the Naked Security site, so here's a link to where you can download a version for yourself.The new security features include Trusted friends (called "Guardian angels" in the infographic).

Facebook says that you will be able to nominate three to five "trusted" friends who can help you if you have a problem accessing your account - if, for instance, someone else has changed its password and locked you out of your email account. The idea is that if you need to login to Facebook but can't access your email account, Facebook will send codes to your friends that they can pass on to you.

None of your friends on their own has enough information to access your account, as they are only sent a single code. But, of course, if your "trusted" friends turned out to be untrustworthy and banded together they would - between them - be able to access your account. So you best be sure that you keep a close eye on who your trusted friends are (especially if you're prone to falling out, or they think practical jokes are amusing), and be pretty confident that they are taking their own computer security seriously.

Oh, and it might be an idea to remind yourself what the word "friend" actually means, as history has shown that many Facebook users have a very different idea of what a "friend" is from the rest of the world. :)

Another thought occurs to me - if a bad guy has taken over your Facebook and email account, isn't it likely that he will also change who your trusted friends are at the same time? Wouldn't that make the whole security measure kinda pointless?

Another new announcement is App Passwords - meaning that you will no longer have to log into Facebook apps with the same credentials that you use for your Facebook account. It's certainly a good idea not to use your Facebook password with anybody other than Facebook - so it's good to hear that Facebook will be offering this new privacy option.

Tony Fadell, the man who oversaw 18 generations of the iPod, announced the first product of his stealth startup Nest Labs Tuesday: a sexy, world-saving … thermostat.

“Nest” is a $249 programmable thermostat that can also program itself.

At first, users might frequently adjust the thermometer when they get up in the morning, leave for work, get home from work and go to sleep. Eventually, however, it will learn their patterns and adjust the temperature to appropriate levels automatically. If they leave on a trip, the thermostat will figure out the house is empty and turn the heat and air conditioning to an energy-saving mode.

90% of programmable thermostats are rarely or never programmed, even though the EPA estimates that programming a thermostat to reduce heating or cooling while out of the house can cut 15% off of a heating and cooling bill. By making it easier to “program” temperature, Fadell’s thermostat could put a much bigger dent reducing energy waste and bills than its traditional counterpart. He has told several publications that users can expect to cut up to 30% of their utility bills.

All this, and Nest is a looker, too.

“If you don’t make it look beautiful, people don’t cherish it,” Fadell told Wired. “I want it to be a jewel on the wall so that it’s a conversation piece. People come over and they go, ‘What’s that on your wall?’ and you go, ‘Oh, you’ve got to check this out.’”

The thermostat is round like a jewel. Instead of faint numbers that make users squint, the temperature on Nest is bold and large, front and center. To adjust, you twist the rim around the “jewel.” It turns blue when it’s cooling things down and red when it’s heating them up. A small leaf image discreetly points users toward energy efficient settings.

Should users forget to make a temperature adjustment before they leave the house, they can control the thermostat with any Internet-connected device, an iPhone app or an Android app.

“The Nest is the iPod of thermostats,” says Levy.

And it is. But it’s also still a thermostat, and a thermostat that costs about $100 more than most competitors. Can an Apple-eye for design turn a traditionally boring product into something for which people pay a premium to display?

So he was a flawed mortal after all. A really flawed mortal, whose boundless obsession turned him into the nearest thing to a Shakespearean figure that our century has seen.

This is what we find after finishing Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, the authorized biography which rocketed to the top of the Amazon charts after its release Monday. It is without a doubt the year’s hardest-to-ignore book.

Indeed, the past few days have felt like belonging to a book club that encompasses the entire tech world. If you listen closely to Mashable this week, you can almost hear the soft tapping of page-forward buttons and iPad screens. So here are a few first impressions and discussion points we’d like to bring up at that book club meeting.

What left the deepest impression in your reading? Let us know in the comments.

Jobs thought different … about deodorant. Jobs cared about tiny details, and the best biographies are all about them — the impressionistic traits that really shape your understanding of a whole person. In Jobs’s case, one of those would have to be the fact that he spent decades insisting his vegan diet would naturally clear up any body odor issues. All you need is fruit. It was an early but persistent example of what Isaacson calls Jobs’s “magical thinking.”

Jobs reveled in his role of Chief Bully … and so did many of those he bullied.Before and after his restoration at Apple, Jobs had one go-to management tool: to get better performance out of your staff, yell, belittle and badmouth the bejesus out of them, often seven days a week and late into the night. Many Apple employees quit under this constant drill sergeant-style pressure; many more were fired. Still, more were inspired to do what they called the best work of their careers. But could he have been nicer about it and gotten the same results? Probably so, Isaacson concludes.

Ultimate design nerd … or obsessive-compulsive?Jobs sweated every detail in his life and work. He lived a spartan existence on the floors of his mansions, largely because he could not bring himself to chose a single sofa or bed frame. He would chew employees out over a few frames removed from an ad, or the thickness of a line in a calculator widget. He had more than 100 black turtlenecks from the same designer in his closet. Tired and hallucinating during his liver transplant operation, he demanded the doctors bring him five models of oxygen mask to test. We always knew Jobs was a design nerd, but his degree of focus still surprises.

Let the tears flow.When Jobs wasn’t obsessing, it seems, he was tearing up. Practically every chapter in the book features some instance of Jobs crying, quite often when he didn’t get his way with product design or corporate organization. But Jobs would also cry happy tears when encountering what he thought of as “purity of spirit” — such as the copy for the first “Think Different” TV ad.

He was a romantic … but not the best at romance. One of the most biggest head-scratchers in the book comes when Jobs is dating folk singer Joan Baez, who is famous but not wealthy, and keeps telling her about a Ralph Lauren dress she’d look great in. Finally, on date night, Jobs drives her to the store with the dress — only to pick up a few shirts for himself and suggest she buy the dress herself. Another girlfriend, one of the loves of his life, would come to believe that he had Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

His stubbornness about health and food hurt him.The hardest detail to take, for those of us still grieving the loss of Jobs, is that he waited nearly a year to have the operation on his first, perfectly curable tumor, allowing it to spread. This was because he didn’t want his body to be violated by surgery, Jobs told Isaacson with a note of regret. He would also fast or eat minimal fruit diets when doctors were urging him to bulk up and eat more protein.

Jobs met his birth father … but not really.Syrian student Abdulfattah Jandali, the father of the baby given to the Jobs family for adoption, lived an itinerant life, at one point running a restaurant near Cupertino. Jobs’s birth sister, novelist Mona Simpson, discovered that Jobs had eaten in the restaurant several times and shook Jandali’s hand without either man knowing the significance from it. Still, Jobs never responded to Jandali’s request for a proper meeting.

There’s a Jobs boat waiting to be built.The Apple founder could not stop designing newer and greater things. Even during his long bouts of sickness, he was hard at work designing a sea-going vessel, perhaps to compete with his yacht-loving friend Larry Ellison. It was, of course, a very minimalist and tasteful boat design.

Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch: Unlikely friends.Jobs formed a friendship with Murdoch during his later years, after persuading the media mogul to create content for the iPad, and would frequently invite him to dinner — to the dismay of many of Jobs’s liberal friends. But Jobs was no right-winger (he offered to do the ads for Obama’s re-election campaign), and did take Murdoch to task for what Jobs saw as the “destructive” nature of Fox News.

Even after 40 interviews, Jobs remains an enigma.Isaacson put Jobs on the record 40 times over two years. Yet, as many reviewers have pointed out, for all these quirks, it’s still a somewhat thin portrait. Jobs shuts down a lot of lines of questions, and keeps many answers ambivalent (such as his “fifty-fifty” belief in life after death.) What was it like to actually live in Steve Jobs’s head? Answering that question still requires some magical thinking on the part of the reader.

Facebook's infographic is too long and thin to properly embed on the Naked Security site, so here's a link to where you can download a version for yourself.The new security features include Trusted friends (called "Guardian angels" in the infographic).

Facebook says that you will be able to nominate three to five "trusted" friends who can help you if you have a problem accessing your account - if, for instance, someone else has changed its password and locked you out of your email account. The idea is that if you need to login to Facebook but can't access your email account, Facebook will send codes to your friends that they can pass on to you.

None of your friends on their own has enough information to access your account, as they are only sent a single code. But, of course, if your "trusted" friends turned out to be untrustworthy and banded together they would - between them - be able to access your account. So you best be sure that you keep a close eye on who your trusted friends are (especially if you're prone to falling out, or they think practical jokes are amusing), and be pretty confident that they are taking their own computer security seriously.

Oh, and it might be an idea to remind yourself what the word "friend" actually means, as history has shown that many Facebook users have a very different idea of what a "friend" is from the rest of the world. :)

Another thought occurs to me - if a bad guy has taken over your Facebook and email account, isn't it likely that he will also change who your trusted friends are at the same time? Wouldn't that make the whole security measure kinda pointless?

Another new announcement is App Passwords - meaning that you will no longer have to log into Facebook apps with the same credentials that you use for your Facebook account. It's certainly a good idea not to use your Facebook password with anybody other than Facebook - so it's good to hear that Facebook will be offering this new privacy option.

With this in-browser transfer experience, the user selects a file and gets a link to share with the recipient. Upon receipt of the peer link, the recipient is securely connected to the sender’s machine, and the file is transferred directly from the sender to the receiver without passing through Sendoid’s servers. It’s this peer-to-peer exchange that makes Sendoid so fast.

Sendoid’s browser-based file transfer service maxes out for files around 1 GB, but the startup also offers a desktop application for transferring files of unlimited size. There’s no cost for either option, and Sendoid has no plans to introduce fees based on file size or transfer frequency. “It shouldn’t cost money to send a 1 GB file,” says Egan. “It just doesn’t make sense anymore. The technology has caught up.”

The file transfer experience heretofore has been clunky, client-based, slow and expensive for end users. Plus, Sendoid believes the demand for sending larger files, especially in the form of high resolution digital photographs, is growing. For these reasons, Egan and fellow co-founder Zac Morris believe the startup is launching at just the right time.

“The technology is here now to move large amounts of data inexpensively,” says Egan. “And this is about the moment in time when file sizes for consumers are crossing the threshold [in size] and are no longer able to be transferred through traditional means.”

It’s a cool service and, from my experience thus far, is quick and easy. So check it out.

Note that I did not mention Dropbox, Box.net, or Ge.tt. All three of these companies offer fantastic services and, of the three I personally use Dropbox all the time — for work and personal file sharing. But, rather than debate which is the service to end all services, it’s probably best to see Sendoid as a complement to these file sharing tools. Each of them are, really, cloud-enabled file hosting services that offer sharing, and sync.

Sendoid differs in that it is peer-to-peer direct, so there’s no cloud and no size limit. So, if you take the example of Dropbox, you have a 2GB limitation (for starters), whereas Sendoid allows you to transfer those big 100MB+ files you have on Dropbox directly to another party’s hard drive. Though Dropbox is pretty reliable, services like Sendoid allow you avoid having to rely on the provider to always have their cloud up and running. The person receiving the file can start downloading without having to wait for you to upload and, in terms of transfer speed, it’s really as fast as your and your recipient’s network connections. If you’re working with fast networks, it’s a breeze. So if you need to transfer a big file to a colleague who lives across the country, and need to do it fast and securely, I’d say Sendoid is worth trying.